I hear all that stuff in England as well being from the north. Some southerners defo have an arrogance about anything north of Watford.
Anyways sorry if I stopped you deleting your post was too quick off the mark I guess.

Not updated for a week because it's been quite hectic. My impromptu trip to Glasgow meant no poker for a few days and I’ve been super busy since then catching up with that and a bunch of other stuff.

Poker

I’ve been running well lately. My 6 max game still needs some work though so planning to knuckle down on that. My runitonce subscription expires today. It helped me get up to speed and build some rough intuition about ranges but I’m ready to switch it up and be more rigorous on specific spots now. I’ll be doing Pio work pre-session now instead of watching vids. Will also get back to posting some hand histories etc.

Results (still sans ipoker):



All you need is Code

I’m getting a bit sick of manually inputting my sessions into Google Docs. So I’m going to try and write a program that grabs my results from the various sites I’m playing on, starting with Party. I haven’t done anything that interacts with a desktop app before and it may well prove to be above my pay grade. If nothing else it should be a good learning experience.

Business

I had a surprisingly productive conversation with a contact my mentor put me in touch with about getting banked for that crypto brokerage business I wrote a bit about. As is often the case, having some sort of personal connection is how you get along in this business. If I can get banked for that then I may well drop everything else and pursue it as it has potential to be super lucrative. Not holding my breath, but quite exciting that it’s a possibility again.

My New Neighbour the Reprobate

This might come off as a bit judgemental but I have a new neighbour in London and I just don't like the guy. He's pretty jovial and personable on a superficial level but something in my gut tells me that his intentions are actually rather sinister. Funnily enough, the house he's staying in has been home to a few other bad eggs. So it's nothing new in a way.

Managed to sneak a picture of him the other day:

Ha ha very good mate.
Boris in no10 is going to be like watching a fight video on youtube where you know it ends badly but cant help watch.

Read it all, good theread, like the GIF-hh. GLGL

Haha yeah. As much as I know everyone who comes to PGC absolutely LOVES it when poker takes a back seat and these threads get derailed by political discussions, I’m not going to indulge them. So while I do have a more nuanced view on the matter, for now it will have to suffice to say that I’m not his biggest fan.

Tusen takk! I guess I lied about only knowing one Norwegian phrase. Good to have another data point in favour of the HH GIFs. Will do more of them going forward.

Monthly Poker Summary

It's a month since I started the thread so a review seems in order. I've finally added that early iPoker upswing to my excel tracker to create a more accurate final results graph:



$3472.08 is my final profit in the spreadsheet but there's about $250 profit in there from before the thread so let's say:

Monthly profit = $3200.

It's cool to keep a log of my results and progress for the thread but obviously my goals should be more process based than results based. I'd give myself a 7.5/10 in terms of application this month. I put in decent volume and worked quite hard in terms of the grind. I also watched a lot of videos. But I dropped off in terms of Pio work towards the end of the month, so I'll be looking to be more consistent with that in the month ahead.

All work and no play makes Tony a dull (and low volume) boy

I took yesterday as my day off. I worked with Elliot Roe a few years back and making a weekly schedule with one full day off planned was one of his first recommendations for me. Paradoxically, it was a bit of a game changer for me in terms of upping my volume. My previous approach would basically be living and breathing poker all day, every day for a period (usually a month or so) and then feeling so burned out that I had to take a bunch of time off. Scheduling one full day off a week seems to prevent that from happening and allows me to achieve consistent volume.

The GOAT time to be alive?

The weather was glorious in London on my day off. I managed to play two games of football, grab coffee with a couple of different friends and enjoy walking between those appointments with the sun in my face and some excellent podcasts in my ears.

As I was walking around enjoying the warm temperature, it struck me that we are living in a brief period of history where the weather is actually better, and our lives are therefore improved, before our planet is ravaged by the climate apocalypse which awaits us a few years hence. Might as well enjoy it, I suppose. But perhaps that’s part of the problem: it’s hard to be motivated to do anything about Armageddon when the build-up to it is so bloody pleasant.

Anyway, all in all it was a wonderful day and I felt well rested to get back on the grind today.

The Smartest Guy I Know

I grabbed a drink with some of the lads I played football with after the game last night. Pleasant bunch, all working in Risk Management. That gave me the chance to retell a story that some David Brent type character had told me on a train when I was 14. Shockingly, none of them had heard this story before. Even more shockingly, they all loved it and burst out laughing. I think I’ve heard it about 3 times now from various different people. Maybe they ALL just knew the same guy, or maybe I just look particularly gullible. Anyway here it is, in case anyone hasn't heard it:

So the smartest guy I know did this Masters degree in Risk Management. He goes into the final exam and it’s a 3 hour paper, but there’s only one question:

“What is risk?”

So he writes, “This is.”

And walks out.

Back to Cards

I realise that very little of this has been poker related. I coded at the weekend then took yesterday off so I guess poker wasn't the first thing on my mind. And when I started writing, this was the nonsense that came out. But I'm back on the internet card game grind now so more stuff about how to play pocket Jacks etc is on the way.

Wishing everyone run good in the week ahead!

Results

I’m feeling a bit down at the moment. I think I’ve lost every day this week and so have been resisting looking at my balances/updating the spreadsheet. Most of it has just been runbad vs fish heads up and there’s not a lot I can do about that but I’m still finding it quite hard to deal with mentally. It prevents me from moving up as aggressively as I would like and also makes me feel I need to focus on grinding these low stakes games out rather than being able to put time into other projects (which I enjoy more).

It also makes writing a blog a bit more difficult. I don’t want to moan about super standard variance but I do want the blog to be an authentic reflection of how I am feeling at the time of writing. I suppose the problem is that the authentic me is an entitled moany git at times. Anyway, here is the graph:



Due to overwhelming public demand

People seem to like the GIFs, so here are a couple. 
I don’t want to post a bunch of boring coolers/suckouts/lost flips. (Actually I really really do. But I won’t.) Instead, here are a couple of hands that may not be the most interesting/entertaining but they are spots I feel lost in and am going to study right now.

Feel like I mess these SB vs EP or CO spots up a lot. Ended up a bit unsure of my strat on the flop. Then having checked my hand, I didn't know how frequently the average 100nl reg would be bluffing bluffing/how light they go 3 streets for value. In summary, I was basically clicking buttons. Going to fire it into Pio.

Also marked this one, because I find myself a bit lost in general in these EP vs BB spots. I do think people will tend to under defend c/r and barrel at these stakes vs a delayed cbet though.

Sunday night at the Empire

I was feeling a bit scunnered with online poker so decided to mix things up last night and head for the bright lights of Leicester Square, also known by tourists as "Lie-Chester Square". I took a Satander bike from near my place in Shoreditch and set off to cycle in. As I smugly peddled uphill past a Deliveroo delivery boy of evidently inferior quad strength, it occurred to me that he was in fact the one having the last laugh. I've worked between 60-70 hours a week lately. If I had done that cycling for Deliveroo I'd have:

1. More money in the bank
2. A blissful ignorance of the concept of variance in one's income
3. Even stronger quads (is that even possible?)

I got to Leicester Square pretty exhausted (my quads are actually quite rubbish, and the Deliveroo guy had obviously been out cycling for hours). There are two options in Leicester Square when it comes to poker - the Hippodrome, which has some relationship with Pokerstars, and the Empire, which is Caesars affiliated.* I've been the to Hippo a bunch of times before so opted to check out the Empire. The biggest game was £1/2, but given I'd been downswinging online and just wanted to get out the house, I didn't really mind. The game was soft, as one would expect, but there were a few guys who were clearly grinding it. I do wonder what the hourly of a £1/2 live grinder would be. Seems like a pretty marginal way to make a living. Although I think the only live sample I've tracked I was making about 7BB/hour and I suppose £14/hour is a good bit above minimum wage. Still, given the variance it only seems worth it to me if you are aspiring to move up and play higher.

First hand I played I misclicked preflop and 3bet to 39 big blinds with QQ. The young reggish guy who had opened looked rather confused as he folded. I've done that a few times playing live. I end up having to put on a poker face that tries to say "Yeah, that's what I meant to do" when villain is tanking.

The only other hand of note I opened KTcc from the hijack and the guy with the biggest stack at the table (who I assumed was a reg) flats the button. Flop Jc8h9s. I check, he bets half pot. I think c/r is probably the most frequent play in terms of GTO here but I decided to check/call because:

1. £1/2 players will call down too light if I check/raise, miss and end up barrelling
2. I reckon they will play passively and check back a lot of the under pair/ace high portion of their range that Pio would likely have them betting with and which we benefit from check raising against

The turn is an ace of clubs, giving us a flush draw. That checks through and the river is an offsuit Ace. I bet pretty big and he thinks for 15 seconds or so and calls with 92hh. As he's scooping up my chips he says to me, "smelled like a bluff," and starts saying something about how if I had an Ace I wouldn't check the flop. Always lovely to receive some free coaching after losing a hand. Every dark cloud.

I then had a conversation with an older Turkish gentleman who was sat to my left. He told me that he came he from Turkey when he was 5 and that the room we were playing in used to be a nightclub where he had been the manager in the 80's. He provided receipts in the form of some photos that looked like they were straight out of a Saturday Night Fever promo and was telling me how those nightclub years were the best of his life. I can confirm that the room looked a lot more fun as a nightclub than as a poker venue. A new guy arrived at the table and after making some pretty questionable plays had quadrupled up. Some of the chips were from our new Turkish friend's stack.

The Turkish guy asked the new guy where he came from, the answer to which was, "Albania."

"Ah, we controlled you for 500 years," Turkey said coolly. Excellent needle if someone has just taken a few quid from you in a £1/2 game. (Although unfortunately not really reusable for this Scotsman of Irish descent.)

The game was good but I was pretty tired and didn't want to totally throw off my routine, so I picked up my chips after a couple of hours and went to cash out and book a £50 loss. There was one guy in line at the cashier and I got in a queue behind him. As this guy in front of me was about to be done, the Turkish nostalgic imperialist former nightclub manager appeared. He had absolutely zero compunction about pretending that he couldn't see me waiting to cash out and jumped in front of me to cash out himself first. Queuing etiquette not a priority in the Ottoman Empire it would seem. In spite of that incident, I somehow still left the room with a bit of a soft spot for him.

I cycled the 4km back to Shoreditch on a Santader bike. The app told me afterwards that I'd burned a couple hundred calories on my journey to and from Leicester Square. That almost convinced me that I had earned the right to eat a 1am salt beef beigel from Brick Lane, but I always feel guilty having treats like that when I'm downswinging so I decided to save it for a winning day instead.

Quite enjoyed the change of gears to live poker. It's very slow but grinding online can be quite isolating and there is a nice buzz around Leicester square in the evening, so I'll probably start going more regularly.



*Every time I write these blogs I realise that I have no idea where I'm supposed to use commas, dashes, colons, semi-colons etc. Big shout out to the various educational establishments where I spent 17 years of my life. Has anyone tried Grammarly? I seem to get targeted by it in ads all the time. I guess the google surveilance system has picked up on my substandard use of punctuation too.

I'm really enjoying this thread and I hope you keep updating it. And your grammar is fine I really wouldn't worry.

i really loled at your quads
gl

Thanks for the comments (and to those who have sent me PMs). It's really nice when people chime in.

Poker


I’ve played a bit online during the day and I will update on that next time. I switched up my routine though and have been back in Leicester Square a couple of times to play live. I managed to book some modest wins which put us at +£203.5 net result from our live ventures so far. I went to the hippodrome to mix things up on Tuesday and the game was a lot of fun. The Arabic guy sat next to me:

1. Had spent a lot of time in South America
2. Had sat a ten day Vipassana meditation retreat
3. Had drank ayahuasca
4. Was coding side projects
5. Was currently focused on winning at capitalism but also planned continue to pursue personal and spiritual development

In other words he was basically me, but with darker hair, a softer accent and a skin pigmentation less susceptible to cancer. We had a good chin wag throughout the night about all of our commonalities.

There was also the kind of fun player whose presence makes or breaks these games as far as I’m concerned. Yes, the general standard of play isn’t very high compared to the equivalent game online, but you play so few hands per hour that your bb/100 really needs to be astronomical for it to be worthwhile. So you need a whale. Someone who calls 3 bets 20% too loosely and doesn’t check raise aggressively enough in SRP’s isn’t going to be enough to put food on the table. But someone who is shouting for an 8 because they think it’s one of their outs when they get 150bb all in with A8 vs K8 on K82 perhaps is.


I have to say though, that other than on Tuesday the games have been a bit disappointing. The reg to punter ratio is surprisingly high given the stakes. It really is a bit weird to have so many pros, semi pros and nits grinding a £1/2 game. I played a bunch of £5/10 and £10/20 in the Palm Beach in Mayfair in summer 2017 and honestly that game was a good bit softer.

Killing two birds with one Ruby

I have a wee interview on Wednesday to become a teaching assistant at a coding bootcamp near where I live. I think it will just be a one or two days a week kind of gig but I’m looking forward to it if it happens. The bootcamp teaches the Ruby on Rails framework though and I have been mostly coding in Javascript/React lately. So I need a bit of a Ruby refresher. When it comes to code, I always learn best by building stuff (as opposed to doing abstract exercises) so I’m going to give myself a small side project for the weekend. I had a think to see if there is anything I could build an MVP of that would overlap with my poker goals and that isn’t too complicated. A quiz app for my Pio study came to mind, so that’s what I’m going to go for. I think mindlessly staring at sims is pretty inefficient and having some sort of quiz structure optimises learning. I’ll see what I can hack together.

This is a really good thread! The snapshot of your schedule is super interesting, it looks like on days you play poker you play a lot. Having read Newport's Deep Work did you consider his theories that you can only "go deep" for around 90 minutes at a time and for 4-5 hours total per day?

Always interesting to hear more about the mental side of poker, one full day off per week is a big help for longevity/consistency. Did you find Elliott Roe helpful in any other specific ways? Best of luck with your goals.

Great thread, inspires me to get out and play again, probably a mix of both live and online too.

Good luck with the bootcamp opportunity! I'm too working with JS an dReact pretty much exclusively as my day job, but I think once you have a programming brain you should be able to pick up Ruby with a little effort and (as you say) building out some projects

Thanks mate! Yes, you are definitely right about the Deep Work stuff. I'm going to be setting my schedule to optimise for that going forward.

Re: Elliot Roe, yeah he was super helpful for me. It's basically therapy which I had never done before and is something that I now think everyone should do. It forced me to face some demons and insecurities that had been with me my whole life. And while it didn't help me solve them all right away, it at least set me on the path towards doing so.

Cheers, mate! Yeah, I'd learned Ruby before so it was really a refresher. JS/React is so hot in the current job market. I think once you have good experience you can contract for +£600/day in London wif dem skillz.

The main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing.

And the other main thing is not hiring anyone from BAILarus.*

I got the job! It wasn’t exactly a tough interview to be fair. There were a couple of Ruby questions and the rest was basically just screening to make sure I wasn’t a dickhead. I’d studied Ruby over the weekend and I managed to get the bluff through about not being a dickhead, so I’m starting next batch. I’m looking forward to it. I enjoy coding and all of the staff at the bootcamp are super cool so I'm sure it will be a good experience.

In order to refresh my Ruby on Rails, I ended up making what is essentially the back end of a poker training site. I think it’s a pretty cool twist on the current learning model and solves a few of the industry's inefficiencies. But I really want to focus on just playing and studying poker at the moment so I’m not going to be making any content or launching that for a good while (if ever). Apart from anything else, I’d need to not be a losing 100nl player (see below) in order to market myself as someone worth learning from .

I think splitting my attention between so many things definitely has a negative effect on my poker results, so I want to have poker as my sole focus for the next month or two. I’m going to try to optimise everything for success in that one area. I do have one other side project that is basically done though. There are just a few annoying tweaks I need to make to get it onto the App Store. I didn’t want to spend any more mental energy on it so I hired a freelancer from Belarus a couple of weeks ago. He had a great CV and portfolio but a week into the job he just started ghosting me before eventually bailing altogether. Got a Ukrainian in to replace him yesterday so hoping he isn't a time waster too.

Poker

My results since coming back have been a good bit worse than I would have expected, but I’m fairly confident that it is largely down to unfortunate card distribution and there is very little I can do about that. Of course I get frustrated and angry with it some days but in general my meditation practice helps me keep a level head. It’s a bit like being on a train that has just been delayed. I know I’ll still get to my destination in the end, but it’s going to take longer than expected and it’s natural for that to precipitate some negative emotions.

I was so busy with interview prep and other stuff that I haven't been updating the spreadsheet or making GIFs this week. I'll get the spreadsheet updated so we have the graph in all it's glory for next time. And here are a couple of gifs from a short session I played earlier today.

Edit: something seems to be messed up with the gifs playing smoothly so I'll describe the action in italics

Here I call 3b pre, c/c half pot on flop, turn checks through then I lead 3/4 on river

Should prob just 4bet pre here but having called I think my line is fine. Prob not perceived to have many bluffs here. Was targeting the JT, T9, AT type hands in his range with this sizing hoping he would hero fold (as well as preventing him from bluffing with a5s etc). Shove could be interesting but again it really depends on assumptions about whether villain will overfold vs that particular line.



Here I bet flop 3 way, overbet turn then CRAI river

Turning a straight vs a rec's two pair almost always makes for fun times.



“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

That's right. I went into politics a couple of posts ago and now I've just quoted the bible. It's as if I read Meale's post in Oladipo's thread about PGC going to the dogs and decided to drag us to a new nadir.

I'd actually not normally be one to quote the bible, but for some reason that line has been in my head a lot recently. I was brought up a Catholic. When I was younger, I assumed that this line was just another one of God’s arbitrary rules for deciding whether or not to let the recently deceased through the pearly gates. It’s HIS house. It's HIS party. He can let in or knock back whoever the hell he pleases. And for whatever reason, he's decided that he doesn’t like rich folk. Or gays. He’s a Marxist homophobe, but he created the universe, so what can you do?

Anyway lately when I've been thinking about that quote, it's been through a more New Agey lens. I’ve been thinking that it might point to a fundamental truth about the human condition: that riches and material success engage our egos in such a way that they make it close to impossible to have any sort of transcendental experience. I've been feeling very present, peaceful and joyful lately. It has struck me in these last few days that this might not be in spite of the fact that I am losing at poker, but because of it. Let me elaborate.

Firstly, in order to deal with the stress and frustration which arises when continually losing, I have been very strict about meditating and implementing other mindfulness practices into my day. As a result, I have largely been able to detach myself from the voice in my head which is whining about how unlucky I am or getting angry or jealous at my opponents. I experience those thoughts, but I don’t identify with them. Secondly, it’s not too difficult for me to be humble right now. I’m essentially a losing 100nl player. That’s not really an identity which my ego can latch onto to feel good about itself.

But what is going to happen if and when I begin to experience success again? Historically, I’ve tended to let any notion of mindfulness slip during my upswings and just kinda bask in egoic glory. That can be enjoyable while it lasts but it ends up coming at a heavy cost. As I engage in self-admiration - I tell myself that I’m the best or that I worked the hardest - I become completely identified again with my thoughts. It is then only a matter of time before the random nature of thoughts dictates that something negative arises. And as I am no longer just the witness, but rather am totally identified with the thoughts, I begin to feel negative myself. In this way, periods of financial success have actually been a pernicious influence on the way that I feel in the long run.

I realise that all of this may read like incoherent and irrelevant babble. You are probably wishing that I had never swapped that bottle of Buckfast for that cup of Ayahuasca and would just write about flops, turns, rivers and maybe some Vegas degening stories. I promise there will be more of that in the next post. But to be honest I’m writing this mostly for myself. I’ve gone through this pattern with success many times. I hope that writing about it here will help make me more conscious and able to avoid the pitfalls of the ego the next time.


*I don't actually have anything against Belarusians. I just liked the pun

Poker Results

I didn't update the spreadsheet for almost 3 weeks so the graph looks really smooth. In reality, it's been very swingy. I've been getting crushed by fish heads up which has been a bit annoying but hey, that's the game we choose to play! The last couple of days I caught some heat though, so I'm hoping that I've turned a corner. Anyway results are out of my control, just gotta keep focused on the process which has generally been good.

I've really focused on quality of play over volume recently. I'm on a 2 week streak on the meditation app I use, I've been playing shorter sessions with more breaks and I've been quitting when my brain begins to feel a bit scrambled. Definitely going to keep things that way. I think combining that with less coding for the next month should really set me up to crush (Poker Gods willing of course).

Anyway, here's the visual aid that has been MIA for a while:




Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise

This old maxim should include a caveat which explains that the 'wealthy' part may not be applicable to poker players. I think there are a tonne of benefits to an early routine but to be honest the games have been pretty rubbish during the morning/early afternoon. I've played a bit later the last couple of days and it's been way better. So I think I'll just surrender to having a later schedule going forward. That's probably smarter than sitting at my computer indignant that there is no rich businessman ready to punt to me at 9am on a Monday morning.

Some Hands from Today

Clash of the Titans (1 and 2)





My Pliggen Baby

Had a lot bigger/more interesting hands with this guy but the HH viewer was kinda messed up so this is all I could get.



I'm a sun-flow-er, I think my quads will be too much

Also had a GIF failure with this one so gotta go old school



Obviously it's nice to be in some good games and run well because it's been a bit of a rough month. I still feel a bit lost in quite a few 6max spots so I have a bunch of hands/situations lined up to study over the next few days.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Last time I was in Vegas, I decided to try making a video blog. It ended up basically being just me doing a tour up and down the strip and saying whatever came into my head. I had never done anything like that before but I had a lot of fun making it. Poker and coding don’t really reward silliness so it was cool to do something that allowed me to be creative in a totally different way. It’s definitely something I’d like to do more of but I’ve had so much on since then that cutting it together hasn’t been a priority. I’m not really feeling like writing much today though so I decided to upload a sneak peek:



It's been a surprisingly sunny day in London so I'm going go for a jog to catch the end of it. Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Good thread, GL. Will be following

Can you please talk a little about the games/stakes available in London? I come to London every now and then and usually play at the Vic but im a rec who plays low. I saw a Sam Grafton tweet where he said all games above 5/10 are private now. Was just wondering if you had any opinions about this. Sorry if this is off topic but saw you talk about the Hippodrome and Palm Beach and would be interested to hear your take.
Thanks Billy.

Thanks mate. Your thread and story are really inspirational.

Sure, although I don’t have a real sample for where games are good because I’ve played quite infrequently. I also tend to go on nights like Monday or Tuesday when the games are less good online, so that probably adds a bias towards being in bad games live as well.


Here’s a rundown of the casinos I know of:

Hippodrome - They spread £1/2 NL every night and I’ve seen £2/5 running about 1/3 of the times I’ve been. I’ve been in a couple of good games there but also a few bad ones given that it was £1/2. When I say ‘bad’ I mean in terms of profitability of course, I’ve always had fun when I’ve gone and had a few good conversations with some interesting folks.

Empire - I’ve been here twice and they had £1/1, £1/2 and £2/5 both times. Games have been same as the Hippo - generally ok but nothing spectacular. Unlike the Hippodrome, there are TVs with Sky Sports etc, so if you want to watch some football while playing cards it’s a good option. The tables are also less closely packed together so probably better Feng Shui.

Palm Beach - I played here a few times in summer 2017 and the games were good back then. It was £5/10/20 most of the time but there would usually only be one table and often they ended up switching from NLHE to PLO or half and half. I don’t play PLO so I’d usually call it a night if that happened. It’s definitely the swankiest option and I quite enjoyed playing here. I met some cool people both regs and recs. I went in once last month because my Argentinian poker player friend was in town and wanted to check it out. The was one table running and it was mostly younger reggy looking types.


The Vic - They spread £1/1 - £10/20 NLHE and some PLO when I went a few times last November. The £2/5 game was never great when I played but again, sample size. It’s the biggest room and kinda iconic in the London poker scene. I think this is the only place that spreads £1/3 if you want to play that inbetweeny stake.

Other casinos - In terms of other casinos with poker, I only know of Aspers in Stratford and a casino in Bayswater the name of which I forget. I’ve never been so not sure about the games but I think it’s generally £1/2.

Thoughts on private games

I actually don't have any idea about +£5/10 games in London lately. The bigger games I played in 2017 weren't private, but if Sam Grafton says it then it will be true. As an aside, I met him briefly in Vegas this year through a mutual friend and had a nice chat. He seemed like a very decent and genuine guy.

As for my thoughts on those kind of games, I'd say that in principle I'm not a fan but there are better and worse reasons for banning someone from a game. The thing that appealed to me about poker when I first discovered it was that it was basically a meritocracy. It didn't matter if you had a college degree or if your daddy was well connected. If you worked hard and had some smarts, you would be rewarded. It was like a card based microcosm of the American Dream. Private games taint that by introducing politics and connections.

With all that said I can understand why you may want to ban someone from a game. Obnoxious, aloof, anti-social types who sit with headphones in and don't engage with anybody really aren't fun to be around. I could see why you wouldn't want to play with them. But once you start banning those types, it's probably a slippery slope before you just start banning people who are better at poker than you because they negatively affect your winrate. Power corrupts, innit?

Thanks for your answer mate, I don't have the roll or the experience to play higher than 1/2 ish but was curious about what was available.

Two Month Review

It's a bit over 2 months now since I started this thread, so let's reflect on how we are doing. August was basically break even which was a bit frustrating but I've had a small uptick the last few days. Let's hope that continues. I can't really fault myself in terms of effort with either studying or playing volume but I have decided that I'm better playing less and focusing on maximising the quality of my play. Here are my results so far:



The Best Thing Since Sliced (naan) Bread

If you are ever touristing in London, here's a tip for you: head to Dishoom in the morning and try one of their breakfast naan rolls. It's basically just a breakfast roll (sausage, egg, bacon etc) on naan bread with a spicy Indian ketchup but the combination is indescribably brilliant. An incredible way to start the day.



And after that I guess you could hit up the museums to see some other cool stuff that we stole from India.

No Pio, No Party

As you may have surmised from the background of that picture, I've been deep in the PioSolver lab lately. I think it can be an amazing tool IF you use it efficiently. Here's my algorithm for Pio study at the moment:

1. Create "Master Sim" with multiple flop sizes and see what frequencies look like at equilibrium
2. Create simplified sims with more implementable strategies (e.g. 100% cb, big size or check, 100% check).
3. Use a couple of main factors to choose your strategy from simplified sims: EV loss compared to Master Sim and how we expect population to play vs this strat compared to Pio and what we gain from that
4. Find exploits

The first three steps can be quite tedious but last part can be fun. I usually look for situations where strategies differ significantly from human intuitions and see how we can exploit those human tendencies. Every so often you find a gem where you should probably be doing something really weird a lot of the time to maximise your EV. Of course you have to be cautious of doing this kind of stuff on most sites because your opponents will catch on rather quick, but Unibet is perfect for it because once we get caught we can change our nickname and be on our merry way.

Looking ahead

As I've said a couple of times, I'm a bit behind where I would like to be in terms of results so I'm hoping that September will be a real breakout month. That's obviously outside of my control though. All I can do is keep following my processes. I start teaching at the coding bootcamp in October so I want to make the most of this full month which I can dedicate to poker before starting to split my time a bit more.

I had a busy week with a friend in town and a couple of other things on so haven't been great at updating the blog but I'll make a commitment to posting more ramblings in the weeks ahead. Wishing everyone a fruitful September!

Hey man,

really enjoyed reading the thread. You mentioned you are working out of a co-working space. Is that just for your coding work or are you also grinding out of one?

Yeah I was doing both but I've been grinding evenings lately and the co-working isn't 24/7 so I've just been playing from home. I like the work/home separation in general though.

Poker, Future Plans and An Encounter With A Sexy Girl

My results have been a bit better in the last week:



Nevertheless, I’ve not been feeling great about how I’ve been doing overall since coming back to poker. I think the main issue is that I feel as if I’m sacrificing skilling up in coding/business stuff by dedicating most of my time to poker. It’s only really worth doing that if I’m making outsized returns. I believe that I’m still capable of having 5 figure months on a regular basis but that feels quite far off at the moment.

In order to deal with this underlying malaise, I’ve made a rough roadmap for the rest of the year. Basically, I will keep poker as priority number one up until the new year. I’ll dedicate myself to Pio study, have a vampire style schedule to optimise grinding hours and generally eat, sleep, breathe poker. If by the end of the year I’m still only really making subsistence money, it’ll probably be time to start looking for a developer job. I’d make similar money but I’d actually be improving some skills that bring me closer to my long term goals. Hopefully though, I start putting in some big months and can instead keep playing poker but also invest in some private coding mentors, keep developing my own projects and do some coding teaching on the side.

I’ve not been great at making GIFs lately so had to try and find some old fashioned hand histories in Poker Tracker. Of the sites that I'm playing, only iPoker is tracked in that way. There's not been much action on there, but I did have this heads up encounter with a player called SEXYGIRL:

iPoker, Hold'em No Limit - £1/£2 - 2 players
Replay this hand on Upswing Poker

SB (Hero): £296.12 (148 bb)
BB: £200.00 (100 bb)

Pre-Flop: (£3) Hero is SB with Q♦ A♥
Hero raises to £5, BB 3-bets to £20, Hero calls £15

Flop: (£40) A♣ 2♣ 8♦ (2 players)
BB bets £14, Hero calls £14

Turn: (£68) T♠ (2 players)
BB bets £44, Hero calls £44

River: (£156) 4♦ (2 players)
BB bets £122 (all-in), Hero calls £122

Total pot: £400 (Rake: £1)

Showdown:
BB shows 3♥ K♥ (high card, Ace)
(Equity - Pre-Flop: 38%, Flop: 3%, Turn: 0%, River: 0%)

SB (Hero) shows Q♦ A♥ (a pair of Aces)
(Equity - Pre-Flop: 62%, Flop: 97%, Turn: 100%, River: 100%)

SB (Hero) wins £399

A Side Project Completed

I got an app I made approved by the iOS App Store today. I think it will take 24 hours to actually appear on the store but I’ll write a bit about it and post a link at some point. It was mostly a vehicle to learn how to code mobile apps so not something I expect to make much money off, but I’ve set the price at $15 which I think is reasonable for what I've made. I’ll maybe keep a tally of how much the app makes here in the same way I post poker results because I know I was super curious about how much apps like SnapShove make. That app seems like a really nice business - technically it’s pretty simple to make but it solves a real consumer need and is nicely put together and marketed. I don’t expect my app to make anything like SnapShove but if I add a few more features I think it could be pretty sweet and then could gain some traction.

While it was frustrating at points to learn a totally new language/framework, I’m really glad that I have done it. Prototyping any mobile ideas will be much easier and quicker in the future having gone through the process already.

(Un)losing My Religion

I signed up for a one day workshop/retreat in London in a couple of weekends where I will receive something along the lines of the Dzogchen “pointing out” instruction. It's funny how things change - me of a few years ago would have been incredulous that I'm paying to spend my Saturday on such nonsense. Maybe a lot of people reading the thread are thinking the same. Here's a bit about how I got started on my journey to being a nutjob.

Probably similar to a lot of the people reading, I used to have a very strictly rationalist and scientific world view. Once I had decided that I didn’t believe in Christianity, basically anything to do with spirituality became anathema to me. Up until a few years ago, if someone talked to me about God, or described themselves as a spiritual person, or used words such as “energy” outside of the physics paradigm, I’d have smiled politely whilst making a silent mental note to score them off my list of “Intelligent People I Know”.


Ironically, but perhaps necessarily, my first step into Wonderland was taken due to reading and listening to the work of a public atheist and neuroscientist called Sam Harris. Unlike other prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Harris insisted that “spiritual experience” was a genuine phenomenon. According to him, believers are not pretending to have these experiences, they are just misinterpreting them. He explored this deeply himself by spending a large portion of his 20s on silent retreat and he now has a meditation app which attempts to teach what he discovered there. Advocacy of spiritual experience along with a strictly scientific worldview was an intersection that I had never encountered before. I think it was the fact that his views on other issues where so obviously predicated on rationality that forced me to sit and up take what Harris said about spirituality seriously.

Going down Sam Harris’s meditation rabbit hole lead to a whole bunch of things. It eventually ended with me drawing quite different conclusions about the nature of reality from Sam, but accepting that there was such a thing as a “spiritual experience” was definitely my first step. This is all very tl;dr and off topic but if it's at all of interest to you then I'd suggest reading his book “Waking Up”. You should probably buy it or get it on Audible, but if you are an absolute scumbag like me then you can listen for free on youtube here:



Back on Topic

I realise when I start writing these blogs I often end up very far from the topic of poker. I'm going to make an effort to have the next post have more strat, thoughts on poker and most importantly GIF hand histories. After all, this is a poker forum!

Timing Is Everything

My results have been a bit better for the last couple of weeks. Obviously there is variance involved but I think a big part of the reason is my change of schedule. I've been playing the more typical evening/weekend poker player hours and there is no doubt that games are better at those times. I like an early morning schedule but if I'm hoping to make really good money at poker again I think I have to work around good games. Here's the graph (we are a smidgeon under $7k profit for the thread):



I think the other obvious thing that can improve my results going forward is moving up stakes. I'm not going to immediately just start grinding higher non-stop, but if there's a good game going I'll consider taking a shot. Still plenty more to do on the study front. I've got some sims running while I'm writing this that I'm hoping clear some stuff up for me.

A few hands:

This doesn't seem that interesting but I took a look at it in Pio and the results made me think that I should be rethinking my whole strategy. Going to investigate further and report back:



Villain is a rec, but one who plays quite tight/straightforward post. He's generally given up when he hasn't had it and bet in accordance with his hand strength when he has. Anyone find a fold here vs the turn 3b? The gif doesn't appear to be playing that smoothly so action is I open, he min 3bets. I c/c half pot on flop, he bets 4 into 18 on turn, I CR to 24, he 3B to 44, I shove.



Things I'm Putting Into My Body

I've found a combo of stuff that seems to be working well for my energy levels/focus when playing this week. Here's my current "stack":



Mushroom Coffee - I've had some trouble cycling on and off coffee for a while. I really love the taste and the ritual of it but I definitely experience some negative side effects - a "crash" a few hours later, increased restlessness and worse sleep. This mushroom coffee seems to be a good substitute where I still get the benefits but the downsides are mitigated.

CBD Oil - I heard a crazy fact about the UK market for CBD oil last week: apparently it is set to be worth more than the rest of the entire UK food supplement market combined in the next few years. If that’s true it’s pretty insane. Perhaps that fact will be self-fulfilling though, because after hearing it I decided that I better try it. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. About an hour after taking it I felt significantly calmer. The whirlwind of thoughts in my head had relaxed a little. I’d not have described myself as an anxious person but it made me think “maybe I actually am quite anxious and just didn’t realise it”.

Of course it’s healthy to be sceptical about this. It’s impossible to hold everything else constant when experimenting with supplements and I’m as partial to the placebo effect as the next guy. From what I understand even medical trials have serious issues with reliability when testing anything to do with nutrition. But consider this some anecdotal evidence that CBD oil might be worth checking out.

Cacao Mix - this is just a nice treat for my sweet tooth when I take a break

Not going to be taking any of these every day but some cool stuff to experiment with and see how you feel.

I'm also going to try to cut down on carbs moving forward. I used to eat super clean (basically just meat, fish and veg), because if I didn't I'd break out in acne. As I got older that stopped happening which has allowed me to start indulging in pasta, bread and all sorts of other nonsense. I've noticed that I feel quite lethargic several days a week though. At first I thought I was just overworking or drinking too much caffeine, but I think diet may be playing a big role. So I'm going to be eating much cleaner going forward. I won't be following anything strict because I know how my body reacts to different foods but my meals will be similar to paleo/ketogenic diets. Of course I'll still allow myself to indulge when meeting friends for food in London. Everything in moderation, including moderation.

Having Fun and Making Money

Grinding poker/piosolver/coding has been going decent lately but it's very isolated and leads to you spending the entire day in the logical part of your mind. I think I've lost some of the sense of fun and playfulness that I had 6 months ago because of that. I generally feel a bit less connected and present with the world and the people I interact with. It's important to have that sense of fun and not to take things too seriously so I'm going to look for ways to find my joie de vivre again.

One way of at least getting out of the house/office and having some human interaction would be playing live. I've been thinking lately that if I want to play poker on the side/recreationally while I spend more time on my business stuff then my hourly EV will be maximised playing live anyway. Making +$100/hr online seems really, really hard these days whereas making that in a good $5/10 or $10/20 game seems quite doable. I read in Gazzy's thread that £5/10 in London is particularly tough and I haven't been impressed by even the £1/2 games I dived into a month or so ago, but I did quite enjoy going and having some conversations and human interaction. So I'm going to check out live games in London in the week ahead.

I think live poker trip reports make for more interesting posts on here anyway, plus the narcissist in me likes the idea of building out a youtube channel. Watch this space

Interested to hear your views on coffee as ive been going through something similar myself. Im trying to drink green tea at home and decaf coffee when im out, Costa ect. I know there is caffeine in green tea but id doesn't feel anywhere near as bad as the coffee crash and decaf coffee from Costa tastes similar to normal. Anyways another decent post and good luck with the live grind.

Following. Also about to do a coding bootcamp - could you recommend any in particular?